Referring back to the existence of something resembling a great World-religion which has come down the centuries, continually expanding and branching in the process, we have now to consider the genesis of that special brand or branch of it which we call Christianity. Each religion or cult, pagan or Christian, has had, as we have seen, a vast amount in common with the general World-religion; yet each has had its own special characteristics. What have been the main characteristics of the Christian branch, as differentiating it from the other branches?
We saw in the last chapter that a certain ascetic attitude towards Sex was one of the most salient marks of the Christian Church; and that whereas most of the pagan cults (though occasionally favoring frightful austerities and cruel sacrifices) did on the whole rejoice in pleasure and the world of the senses, Christianity-following largely on Judaism--displayed a tendency towards renunciation of the world and the flesh, and a withdrawal into the inner and more spiritual regions of the mind. The same tendency may be traced in the Egyptian and Phrygian cults of that period. It will be remembered how Juvenal (Sat. VI, 510-40) chaffs the priests of Cybele at Rome for making themselves "eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake," or the rich Roman lady for plunging in the wintry Tiber for a propitiation to Isis. No doubt among the later pagans "the long intolerable tyranny of the senses over the soul" had become a very serious matter. But Christianity represented perhaps the most powerful reaction against this; and this reaction had, as indicated in the last chapter, the enormously valuable result that (for the time) it disentangled love from sex and established Love, pure and undefiled, as ruler of the world. "God is Love." But, as also indicated, the divorce between the two elements of human nature, carried to an extreme, led in time to a crippling of both elements and the development of a certain morbidity and selfconsciousness which, it cannot be denied, is painfully marked among some sections of Christians--especially those of the altruistic and 'philanthropic' type.
Another characteristic of Christianity which is also very fine in its way but has its limits of utility, has been its insistence on "morality." Some modern writers indeed have gone so far--forgetting, I suppose, the Stoics--as to claim that Christianity's chief mark is its high morality, and that the pagans generally were quite wanting in the moral sense! This, of course, is a profound mistake. I should say that, in the true sense of the word, the early and tribal peoples have been much more 'moral' as a rule--that is, ready as individuals to pay respect to the needs of the community--than the later and more civilized societies. But the mistake arises from the different interpretations of the word; for whereas all the pagan religions insisted very strongly on the just- mentioned kind of morality, which we should call CIVIC DUTY TO ONE'S NEIGHBOR, the Christian made morality to consist more especially in a mans DUTY TO GOD. It became with them a private affair between a mans self and-God, rather than a public affair; and thus led in the end to a very obnoxious and quite pharisaic kind of morality, whose chief inspiration was not the helping of one's fellow-man but the saving of one's own soul.
There may perhaps be other salient points of differentiation between Christianity and the preceding pagan religions; but for the present we may recognize these two--(a) the tendency towards a renunciation of the world, and the consequent cultivation of a purely spiritual love and (b) the insistence on a morality whose inspiration was a private sense of duty to God rather than a public sense of duty to one's neighbor and to society generally. It may be interesting to trace the causes which led to this differentiation.
Three centuries before our era the conquests of Alexander had had the effect of spreading the Greek thought and culture over most of the known world. A vast number of small bodies of worshipers of local deities, with their various rituals and religious customs, had thus been broken up, or at least brought into contact with each other and partially modified and hellenized. The orbit of a more general conception of life and religion was already being traced. By the time of the founding of the first Christian Church the immense conquests of Rome had greatly extended and established the process. The Mediterranean had become a great Roman lake. Merchant ships and routes of traffic crossed it in all directions; tourists visited its shores. The known world had become one. The numberless peoples, tribes, nations, societies within the girdle of the Empire, with their various languages, creeds, customs, religions, philosophies, were profoundly influencing each other.[1] A great fusion was taking place; and it was becoming inevitable that the next great religious movement would have a world-wide character.
[1] For an enlargement on this theme see Glover's Conflict of Religions in the early Roman Empire; also S. J. Case, Evolution of Early Christianity(University of Chicago, 1914). The Adonis worship, for instance (a resurrection-cult), "was still thriving in Syria and Cyprus when Paul preached there," and the worship of Isis and Serapis had already reached then, Rome and Naples.
It was probable that this new religion would combine many elements from the preceding rituals in one cult. In connection with the fine temples and elaborate services of Isis and Cybele and Mithra there was growing up a powerful priesthood; Franz Cumont[1] speaks of "the learned priests of the Asiatic cults" as building up, on the foundations of old fetichism and superstition, a complete religious philosophy--just as the Brahmins had built the monism of the Vedanta on the "monstrous idolatries of Hinduism." And it was likely that a similar process would evolve the new religion expected. Toutain again calls attention to the patronage accorded to all these cults by the Roman Emperors, as favoring a new combination and synthesis: --"Hadrien, Commode, Septime Severe, Julia Domna, Elagabal, Alexandre Severe, en particulier ont contribue personnellement a la popularite et au succes des cultes qui se celebraient en l'honneur de Serapis et d'Isis, des divinites syriennes et de Mithra."[2]
[1] See Cumont, Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain (Paris, 1906), p. 253.[2] Cultes paiens dans l'Empire Romain (2 vols., 1911), vol. ii, p. 263.
It was also probable that this new Religion would show (as indicated in the last chapter) a reaction against mere sex-indulgence; and, as regards its standard of Morality generally, that, among so many conflicting peoples with their various civic and local customs, it could not well identify itself with any ONE of these but would evolve an inner inspiration of its own which in its best form would be love of the neighbor, regardless of the race, creed or customs of the neighbor, and whose sanction would not reside in any of the external authorities thus conflicting with each other, but in the sense of the soul's direct responsibility to God.
So much for what we might expect a priori as to the influence of the surroundings on the general form of the new Religion. And what about the kind of creed or creeds which that religion would favor? Here again we must see that the influence of the surroundings compelled a certain result. Those doctrines which we have described in the preceding chapters--doctrines of Sin and Sacrifice, a Savior, the Eucharist, the Trinity, the Virgin-birth, and so forth--were in their various forms seething, so to speak, all around. It was impossible for any new religious synthesis to escape them; all it could do would be to appropriate them, and to give them perhaps a color of its own. Thus it is into the midst of this germinating mass that we must imagine the various pagan cults, like fertilizing streams, descending. To trace all these streams would of course be an impossible task; but it may be of use, as an example of the process, to take the case of some particular belief. Let us take the belief in the coming of a Saviorgod; and this will be the more suitable as it is a belief which has in the past been commonly held to be distinctive of Christianity. Of course we know now that it is not in any sense distinctive, but that the long tradition of the Savior comes down from the remotest times, and perhaps from every country of the world.[1] The Messianic prophecies of the Jews and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah emptied themselves into the Christian teachings, and infected them to some degree with a Judaic tinge. The "Messiah" means of course the Anointed One. The Hebrew word occurs some 40 times in the Old Testament; and each time in the Septuagint or Greek translation (made mainly in the third century BEFORE our era) the word is translated , or Christos, which again means Anointed. Thus we see that the idea or the word "The Christ" was in vogue in Alexandria as far back certainly as 280 B.C., or nearly three centuries before Jesus. And what the word "The Anointed" strictly speaking means, and from what the expression is probably derived, will appear later. In The Book of Enoch, written not later than B.C. 170,[2] the Christ is spoken of as already existing in heaven, and about to come as judge of all men, and is definitely called "the Son of Man." The Book of Revelations is FULL of passages from Enoch; so are the Epistles of Paul; so too the Gospels. The Book of Enoch believes in a Golden Age that is to come; it has Dantesque visions of Heaven and Hell, and of Angels good and evil, and it speaks of a "garden of Righteousness" with the "Tree of Wisdom" in its midst. Everywhere, says Prof. Drews, in the first century B.C., there was the longing for a coming Savior.
[1] Even to-day, the Arabian lands are always vibrating with prophecies of a coming Mahdi.[2] See Edition by R. H. Charles (1893).
But the Savior-god, as we also know, was a familiar figure in Egypt. The great Osiris was the Savior of the world, both in his life and death: in his life through the noble works he wrought for the benefit of mankind, and in his death through his betrayal by the powers of darkness and his resurrection from the tomb and ascent into heaven.[1] The Egyptian doctrines descended through Alexandria into Christianity--and though they did not influence the latter deeply until about 300 A.D., yet they then succeeded in reaching the Christian Churches, giving a color to their teachings with regard to the Savior, and persuading them to accept and honor the Egyptian worship of Isis in the Christian form of the Virgin Mary.
[1] See ch. ii.Again, another great stream of influence descended from Persia in the form of the cult of Mithra. Mithra, as we have seen,[1] stood as a great Mediator between God and man. With his baptisms and eucharists, and his twelve disciples, and his birth in a cave, and so forth, he seemed to the early Fathers an invention of the devil and a most dangerous mockery on Christianity--and all the more so because his worship was becoming so exceedingly popular. The cult seems to have reached Rome about B.C. 70. It spread far and wide through the Empire. It extended to Great Britain, and numerous remains of Mithraic monuments and sculptures in this country--at York, Chester and other places--testify to its wide acceptance even here. At Rome the vogue of Mithraism became so great that in the third century A. D., it was quite doubtful[2] whether it OR Christianity would triumph; the Emperor Aurelian in 273 founded a cult of the Invincible Sun in connection with Mithraism;[3] and as St. Jerome tells us in his letters,[4] the latter cult had at a later time to be suppressed in Rome and Alexandria by PHYSICAL FORCE, so powerful was it.
[1] Ch. ii.[2] See Cumont, op. cit., who says, p. 171:--"Jamais, pas meme a 1'epoque des invasions mussulmanes, l'Europe ne sembla plus pres de devenir asiatique qu'au moment ou Diocletien reconnaissait officiellement en Mithra, le protecteur de l'empire reconstitue." See also Cumont's Mysteres de Mithra, preface. The Roman Army, in fact, stuck to Mithra throughout, as against Christianity; and so did the Roman nobility. (See S. Augustine's Confessions, Book VIII, ch. 2.)
[3] Cumont indeed says that the identification of Mithra with the Sun (the emblem of imperial power) formed one reason why Mithraism was NOT persecuted at that time.
[4] Epist. cvii, ad Laetam. See Robertson's Pagan Christs, p. 350.Nor was force the only method employed. IMITATION is not only the sincerest flattery, but it is often the most subtle and effective way of defeating a rival. The priests of the rising Christian Church were, like the priests of ALL religions, not wanting in craft; and at this moment when the question of a World-religion was in the balance, it was an obvious policy for them to throw into their own scale as many elements as possible of the popular Pagan cults. Mithraism had been flourishing for 600 years; and it is, to say the least, CURIOUS that the Mithraic doctrines and legends which I have just mentioned should all have been adopted (quite unintentionally of course!) into Christianity; and still more so that some others from the same source, like the legend of the Shepherds at the Nativity and the doctrine of the Resurrection and Ascension, which are NOT mentioned at all in the original draft of the earliest Gospel (St. Mark), should have made their appearance, in the Christian writings at a later time, when Mithraism was making great forward strides. History shows that as a Church progresses and expands it generally feels compelled to enlarge and fortify its own foundations by inserting material which was not there at first. I shall shortly give another illustration of this; at present I will merely point out that the Christian writers, as time went on, not only introduced new doctrines, legends, miracles and so forth--most of which we can trace to antecedent pagan sources--but that they took especial pains to destroy the pagan records and so obliterate the evidence of their own dishonesty. We learn from Porphyry[1] that there were several elaborate treatises setting forth the religion of Mithra; and J. M. Robertson adds (Pagan Christs, p. 325): "everyone of these has been destroyed by the care of the Church, and it is remarkable that even the treatise of Firmicus is mutilated at a passage (v.) where he seems to be accusing Christians of following Mithraic usages." While again Professor Murray says, "The polemic literature of Christianity is loud and triumphant; the books of the Pagans have been DESTROYED."[2]
[1] De Abstinentia, ii. 56; iv. 16.[2] Four Stages, p. 180. We have probably an instance of this destruction in the total disappearance of Celsus' lively attack on Christianity (180 A.D.), of which, however, portions have been fortunately preserved in Origen's rather prolix refutation of the same.
Returning to the doctrine of the Savior, I have already in preceding chapters given so many instances of belief in such a deity among the pagans--whether he be called Krishna or Mithra or Osiris or Horus or Apollo or Hercules --that it is not necessary to dwell on the subject any further in order to persuade the reader that the doctrine was 'in the air' at the time of the advent of Christianity. Even Dionysus, then a prominent figure in the 'Mysteries,' was called Eleutherios, The Deliverer. But it may be of interest to trace the same doctrine among the PRECHRISTIAN sects of Gnostics. The Gnostics, says Professor Murray,[1] "are still commonly thought of as a body of CHRISTIAN heretics. In reality there were Gnostic sects scattered over the Hellenistic world BEFORE Christianity as well as after. They must have been established in Antioch and probably in Tarsus well before the days of Paul or Apollos. Their Savior, like the Jewish Messiah, was established in men's minds before the Savior of the Christians. 'If we look close,' says Professor Bousset, 'the result emerges with great clearness that the figure of the Redeemer as such did not wait for Christianity to force its way into the religion of Gnosis, but was already present there under various forms.' "
[1] Four Stages, p. 143.This Gnostic Redeemer, continues Professor Murray, "is descended by a fairly clear genealogy from the 'Tritos Soter' ('third Savior')[1] of early Greece, contaminated with similar figures, like Attis and Adonis from Asia Minor, Osiris from Egypt, and the special Jewish conception of the Messiah of the Chosen people. He has various names, which the name of Jesus or 'Christos,' 'the Anointed,' tends gradually to supersede. Above all, he is in some sense Man, or 'the second Man' or 'the Son of Man' . . . He is the real, the ultimate, the perfect and eternal Man, of whom all bodily men are feeble copies."[2]
[1] There seems to be some doubt about the exact meaning of this expression. Even Zeus himself was sometimes called 'Soter,' and at feasts, it is said, the THIRD goblet was always drunk in his honor.
[2] See also The Gnostic Story of Jesus Christ, by Gilbert T. Sadler (C. W. Daniel, 1919).This passage brings vividly before the mind the process of which I have spoken, namely, the fusion and mutual interchange of ideas on the subject of the Savior during the period anterior to our era. Also it exemplifies to us through what an abstract sphere of Gnostic religious speculation the doctrine had to travel before reaching its expression in Christianity.[1] This exalted and high philosophical conception passed on and came out again to some degree in the Fourth Gospel and the Pauline Epistles (especially I Cor. xv); but I need hardly say it was not maintained. The enthusiasm of the little scattered Christian bodies-- with their communism of practice with regard to THIS world and their intensity of faith with regard to the next --began to wane in the second and third centuries A.D. As the Church (with capital initial) grew, so was it less and less occupied with real religious feeling, and more and more with its battles against persecution from outside, and its quarrels and dissensions concerning heresies within its own borders. And when at the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D) it endeavored to establish an official creed, the strife and bitterness only increased. "There is no wild beast," said the Emperor Julian, "like an angry theologian." Where the fourth Evangelist had preached the gospel of Love, and Paul had announced redemption by an inner and spiritual identification with Christ, "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive"; and whereas some at any rate of the Pagan cults had taught a glorious salvation by the new birth of a divine being within each man: "Be of good cheer, O initiates in the mystery of the liberated god; For to you too out of all your labors and sorrows shall come Liberation"--the Nicene creed had nothing to propound except some extremely futile speculations about the relation to each other of the Father and the Son, and the relation of BOTH to the Holy Ghost, and of all THREE to the Virgin Mary--speculations which only served for the renewal of shameful strife and animosities--riots and bloodshed and murder--within the Church, and the mockery of the heathen without. And as far as it dealt with the crucifixion, death and resurrection of the Lord it did not differ from the score of preceding pagan creeds, except in the thorough materialism and lack of poetry in statement which it exhibits. After the Council of Nicaea, in fact, the Judaic tinge in the doctrines of the Church becomes more apparent, and more and more its Scheme of Salvation through Christ takes the character of a rather sordid and huckstering bargain by which Man gets the better of God by persuading the latter to sacrifice his own Son for the redemption of the world! With the exception of a few episodes like the formation during the Middle Ages of the noble brotherhoods and sisterhoods of Frairs and Nuns, dedicated to the help and healing of suffering humanity, and the appearance of a few real lovers of mankind (and the animals) like St. Francis--(and these manifestations can hardly be claimed by the Church, which pretty consistently opposed them)--it may be said that after about the fourth century the real spirit and light of early Christian enthusiasm died away. The incursions of barbarian tribes from the North and East, and later of Moors and Arabs from the South, familiarized the European peoples with the ideas of bloodshed and violence; gross and material conceptions of life were in the ascendant; and a romantic and aspiring Christianity gave place to a worldly and vulgar Churchianity.
[1] When travelling in India I found that the Gnanis or Wise Men there quite commonly maintained that Jesus (judging from his teaching) must have been initiated at some time in the esoteric doctrines of the Vedanta.
I have in these two or three pages dealt only--and that very briefly--with the entry of the pagan doctrine of the Savior into the Christian field, showing its transformation there and how Christianity could not well escape having a doctrine of a Savior, or avoid giving a color of its own to that doctrine. To follow out the same course with other doctrines, like those which I have mentioned above, would obviously be an endless task--which must be left to each student or reader to pursue according to his opportunity and capacity. It is clear anyhow, that all these elements of the pagan religions--pouring down into the vast reservoir, or rather whirlpool, of the Roman Empire, and mixing among all these numerous brotherhoods, societies, collegia, mystery-clubs, and groups which were at that time looking out intently for some new revelation or inspiration-- did more or less automatically act and react upon each other, and by the general conditions prevailing were modified, till they ultimately combined and took united shape in the movement which we call Christianity, but which only--as I have said--narrowly escaped being called Mithraism--so nearly related and closely allied were these cults with each other.
At this point it will naturally be asked: "And where in this scheme of the Genesis of Christianity is the chief figure and accredited leader of the movement--namely Jesus Christ himself--for to all appearance in the account here given of the matter he is practically non-existent or a negligible quantity?" And the question is a very pertinent one, and very difficult to answer. "Where is the founder of the Religion?"--or to put it in another form: "Is it necessary to suppose a human and visible Founder at all?" A few years ago such a mere question would have been accounted rank blasphemy, and would only-- if passed over--have been ignored on account of its supposed absurdity. To-day, however, owing to the enormous amount of work which has been done of late on the subject of Christian origins, the question takes on quite a different complexion. And from Strauss onwards a growingly influential and learned body of critics is inclined to regard the whole story of the Gospels as LEGENDARY. Arthur Drews, for instance, a professor at Karlsruhe, in his celebrated book The Christ-Myth,[1] places David F. Strauss as first in the myth field--though he allows that Dupuis in L'origine de tous les cultes (1795) had given the clue to the whole idea. He then mentions Bruno Bauer (1877) as contending that Jesus was a pure invention of Mark's, and John M. Robertson as having in his Christianity and Mythology (1900) given the first thoroughly reasoned exposition of the legendary theory; also Emilio Bossi in Italy, who wrote Jesu Christo non e mai esistito, and similar authors in Holland, Poland, and other countries, including W. Benjamin Smith, the American author of The Pre-christian Jesus (1906), and P. Jensen in Das Gilgamesch Epos in den Welt-literatur (1906), who makes the Jesus-story a variant of the Babylonian epic, 2000 B.C. A pretty strong list![2] "But," continues Drews, "ordinary historians still ignore all this." Finally, he dismisses Jesus as "a figure swimming obscurely in the mists of tradition." Nevertheless I need hardly remark that, large and learned as the body of opinion here represented is, a still larger (but less learned) body fights desperately for the actual HISTORICITY of Jesus, and some even still for the old view of him as a quite unique and miraculous revelation of Godhood on earth.
[1] Die Christus-mythe: verbesserte und erweitezte Ausgabe, Jena, 1910.[2] To which we may also add Schweitzer's Quest of the historical Jesus (1910).
At first, no doubt, the LEGENDARY theory seems a little TOO far-fetched. There is a fashion in all these things, and it MAY be that there is a fashion even here. But when you reflect how rapidly legends grow up even in these days of exact Science and an omniscient Press; how the figure of Shakespeare, dead only 300 years, is almost completely lost in the mist of Time, and even the authenticity of his works has become a subject of controversy; when you find that William Tell, supposed to have lived some 300 years again before Shakespeare, and whose deeds in minutest detail have been recited and honored all over Europe, is almost certainly a pure invention, and never existed; when you remember--as mentioned earlier in this book[1]--that it was more than five hundred years after the supposed birth of Jesus before any serious effort was made to establish the date of that birth--and that then a purely mythical date was chosen: the 25th December, the day of the SUN'S new birth after the winter solstice, and the time of the supposed birth of Apollo, Bacchus, and the other Sungods; when, moreover, you think for a moment what the state of historical criticism must have been, and the general standard of credibility, 1,900 years ago, in a country like Syria, and among an ignorant population, where any story circulating from lip to lip was assured of credence if sufficiently marvelous or imaginative;--why, then the legendary theory does not seem so improbable. There is no doubt that after the destruction of Jerusalem (in A.D. 70), little groups of believers in a redeeming 'Christ' were formed there and in other places, just as there had certainly existed, in the first century B.C., groups of Gnostics, Therapeutae, Essenes and others whose teachings were very SIMILAR to the Christian, and there was now a demand from many of these groups for 'writings' and 'histories' which should hearten and confirm the young and growing Churches. The Gospels and Epistles, of which there are still extant a great abundance, both apocryphal and canonical, met this demand; but how far their records of the person of Jesus of Nazareth are reliable history, or how far they are merely imaginative pictures of the kind of man the Saviour might be expected to be,[2] is a question which, as I have already said, is a difficult one for skilled critics to answer, and one on which I certainly have no intention of giving a positive verdict. Personally I must say I think the 'legendary' solution quite likely, and in some ways more satisfactory than the opposite one--for the simple reason that it seems much more encouraging to suppose that the story of Jesus, (gracious and beautiful as it is) is a myth which gradually formed itself in the conscience of mankind, and thus points the way of humanity's future evolution, than to suppose it to be the mere record of an unique and miraculous interposition of Providence, which depended entirely on the powers above, and could hardly be expected to occur again.
[1] Ch. II.[2] One of Celsus' accusations against the Christians was that their Gospels had been written "several times over" (see Origen, Contra Celsum, ii. 26, 27).
However, the question is not what we desire, but what we can prove to be the actual fact. And certainly the difficulties in the way of regarding the Gospel story (or stories, for there is not one consistent story) as TRUE are enormous. If anyone will read, for instance, in the four Gospels, the events of the night preceding the crucifixion and reckon the time which they would necessarily have taken to enact-- the Last Supper, the agony in the Garden, the betrayal by Judas, the haling before Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, and then before Pilate in the Hall of judgment (though courts for the trial of malefactors do not GENERALLY sit in the middle of the night); then--in Luke--the interposed visit to Herod, and the RETURN to Pilate; Pilate's speeches and washing of hands before the crowd; then the scourging and the mocking and the arraying of Jesus in purple robe as a king; then the preparation of a Cross and the long and painful journey to Golgotha; and finally the Crucifixion at sunrise;--he will see--as has often been pointed out-- that the whole story is physically impossible. As a record of actual events the story is impossible; but as a record or series of notes derived from the witnessing of a "mystery- play"--and such plays with VERY SIMILAR incidents were common enough in antiquity in connection with cults of a dying Savior, it very likely IS true (one can see the very dramatic character of the incidents: the washing of hands, the threefold denial by Peter, the purple robe and crown of thorns, and so forth); and as such it is now accepted by many well-qualified authorities.[1]
[1] Dr. Frazer in The Golden Bough (vol. ix, "The Scapegoat," p. 400) speaks of the frequency in antiquity of a Mystery-play relating to a God-man who gives his life and blood for the people; and he puts forward tentatively and by no means dogmatically the following note:--"Such a drama, if we are right, was the original story of Esther and Mordecai, or (to give their older names) Ishtar and Marduk. It was played in Babylonia, and from Babylonia the returning Captives brought it to Judaea, where it was acted, rather as an historical than a mythical piece, by players who, having to die in grim earnest on a cross or gallows, were naturally drawn from the gaol rather than the green-room. A chain of causes, which because we cannot follow them might--in the loose language of common life--be called an accident, determined that the part of the dying god in this annual play should be thrust upon Jesus of Nazareth, whom the enemies he had made in high places by his outspoken strictures were resolved to put out of the way." See also vol. iv, "The Dying God," in the same book.
There are many other difficulties. The raising of Lazarus, already dead three days, the turning of water into wine (a miracle attributed to Bacchus, of old), the feeding of the five thousand, and others of the marvels are, to say the least, not easy of digestion. The "Sermon on the Mount" which, with the "Lord's Prayer" embedded in it, forms the great and accepted repository of 'Christian' teaching and piety, is well known to be a collection of sayings from pre-christian writings, including the Psalms, Isaiah, Ecclesiasticus, the Secrets of Enoch, the Shemonehesreh (a book of Hebrew prayers), and others; and the fact that this collection was really made AFTER the time of Jesus, and could not have originated from him, is clear from the stress which it lays on "persecutions" and "false prophets"--things which were certainly not a source of trouble at the time Jesus is supposed to be speaking, though they were at a later time--as well as from the occurrence of the word "Gentiles," which being here used apparently in contra- distinction to "Christians" could not well be appropriate at a time when no recognized Christian bodies as yet existed.